Cloud computing, or the use of a remote server to process, store, and manage data, is a reality that users engage with every day. Many, if not all, of the most popular websites on the web depend on a cloud services provider in some way shape or form. Of course, there was a time when this technology was little more than a far-off dream.
The first computers were designed in the last decades of the Nineteenth century to help compute the results of the 1890 U.S. Census… though they never got quite off the drawing board. The very first actual computers appeared in the early 1940s in order to calculate missile trajectories for the U.S. Army. Soon thereafter, IBM brought the computer to large and mid-sized businesses in the early 1960s and there was no turning back.
With the growing need for access by users remote from the data center, the first networks appeared. These time-share networks used mainframes and attached terminals. It wasn’t until the early 1980s when local area networks began appearing, as the PC made its way to more and more desktops.
LANs enabled groups of users exchanged files, messages, and resources. Soon, companies began to interconnect LANs through wide area networks, connecting geographically dispersed users and resources.
Today, high-speed IP networks all over the support storage area networks (SANs), wireless LANs, and data, voice, and video traffic traveling over the same broadband network, seamlessly connecting employees, partners, suppliers, and customers.
Nowadays, users find themselves in the “Dawn of the Cloud,” but what many don’t know that the breakthrough for such a technology first came from Salesforce.com in 1999. Salesforce set the precedent for companies being able to deliver applications over the internet.
In 2006. cloud services provider, Amazon, established Elastic Compute cloud, a service where users could rent computers from which to run their applications. This is regarded by many as the first cloud computing infrastructure. With Web 2.0 following close behind in 2009, many companies such as Google and Microsoft set their eyes to the cloud.
Today, everything from medical industries to retail to gaming rely on cloud service and cloud computing.